Amy (Uplifting Story)

I didn’t know Amy Winehouse really well. Barely would I recognize her voice when I’d hear her most famous songs on Spotify. Even if I liked the voice, I only discovered the real depth of her strength purely incidentally, when my wife Julie enlisted us for a guided tour of the Amy Winehouse exhibit held in June 2018 at the Jewish Museum of Brussels.

I never was so much of a museum guy. But things got dramatically different when, among the stage dresses, the shoes and the gowns, I discovered, painted on the walls, a couple of Amy’s most emblematic quotes. One of them in particular caught my attention and is now imprinted in my heart forever :

“I want to be remembered for being an actress, a singer, for sell-out concerts and sell-out West End and Broadway shows. For being just me”.

She was only 16 when she wrote those lines, and it just shows how determined she was to succeed.

Some people may wonder why I chose to be “Going for the Oscar” now that I’m fifty. And my answer is that it’s bold, and that it’s exactly where I want to go. My only regret would be that I didn’t make this decision when I was 16. I wasn’t strong enough in that time and I had many inner demons to fight. Probably the same kind that took Amy later, while she was just a young blossoming flower.

The better you define your outcome, the more chances you get to make it happen!